"Mum charged £47 for two bags of pick and mix from Cardiff Winter Wonderland"

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www.walesonline.co.uk/news/wales-news/mum-charged-47-two-bags-25576870

When I saw the headline I was shocked someone would pay that much for a couple of bags of sweets even at a place like winter wonderland, which like tourist traps and a lot of attractions are going to be very expensive.

However on reading the story the company isn't wrong in saying that the price per 100g was displayed, as well as a weighing scale being available, plus the mum let her child start eating the sweets before they had fully paid so couldn't put them back?

I don't think the stall has really done anything wrong? Apart from it being very expensive, but then that's why I don't buy stuff from these sorts of places.

All this mumsnet shit about how much sugar etc , it doesn't equal pure sugar does it and they may of been sweets to last a while , may be kids that only get sweets a couple times a year

People aren't necessarily saying that they are buying a big bag of sugar, even though sweets are obviously mainly sugar; it's just that a bag of sugar is a commonly-known weight/measure to use as a yardstick.

It's true that, without scales, it's hard to judge the difference between 100g and 150g or whatever, but the difference between 100g and 1.6kg.... come on, now.

I know the kids had multiple bags, but they were paid for as one, and would (together) have weighed approaching the same as a 2l bottle of Coke, which anybody can easily differentiate between and a bag of Haribo.

I wonder what the difference in the volume is of 1.6 kg of fudge versus 1.6 kg of normal pick and mix sweets?

Now that's a good maths question.

Honestly they should include this article in the national curriculum, real life application of density in a physics lesson!

They effectively brought about the same mass as:

5 cans of coke
2 bottles of wine
3 pints of beer

All of which is a lot of mass

cakeorwine · Today 10:50
Interesting on the skittles - if she had brought 40 bags of skittles from Tesco, it would have cost 40 x 65p - which is £26. A bag of Skittles is £1.45 / 100g.

I was wondering why you say she would have bought 40 bags of skittles (40000g)?

They only bought a total of 1600g which would be a 16 bags of skittles costing £23.20

Not 40000g
4000g

1 bag weighs 45g
40 bags weighs 1600 g

At £1.45 per 100g, that's £26

It has NOTHING to do with what it looks like.

It does in this case. They said they didn’t let their kids go overboard. But they clearly did have a lot of sweets in the bags. Imagine emptying 40 bags, (or 20 in each bag) of skittles into a pick n mix bag.... it’s a lot.

The vast majority of us know what an appropriate portion of sweets is for our children. They would have known that there was a lot of normal portions in there. So for them to claim there wasn’t a lot of sweets is just ridiculous.

It’s fine that they bought that amount, no judgement, I would presume the kids aren’t going to eat them all in one go. My kids eat some sweets/chocolate most days, most individual sweet packs or chocolate bags are 45g ish....so these parents bought enough for 5 weeks or 2.5 weeks for 2 kids if they are done every day, based on ‘normal’ portions. And then moaned about the price. 🤦🏻‍♀️ It was never going to be cheap.

1 bag weighs 45g
40 bags weighs 1600 g

Actually it's 36 bags. I was estimating before

if they HAVE SOME every day

My son used to work at the cinema, people would pack as many sweets into a tub as they could, then be shocked when it was eleventy million quid and refuse to pay. It all had to be binned. Despite signs up saying price by 100 g.

itsgettingweird· Today 10:56
We'll surely if you don't know what 100g looks like and can't afford to pay whatever it costs for what you choose - you use the scales provided?

They had one weighing scales from what I could see attached to the till where people were queuing to pay, so it wouldn’t be as easy as weighing as you go

The set-up is designed to get a lot of money out of the parents of enticed, clamouring, tired children at the end of an exciting day out. These parents didn’t think until it was too late but it’s not all that surprising. Caution ‘off’ buttons get forgotten when people are on treat mode.

^This.

Especially if you're allowing your child to eat the sweets before you've paid for them...there's a thing called "manners", see also "greed".

The price was displayed and now she's bleating to a newspaper...cue "Daily Mail Sad Face".

I wonder if she treats her grocery shopping with such wanton abandon? 🤦‍♀️

You've got to admit it's a clever system.

Lessons learned by all.
There should be scales for people to weigh - but if it's Pick and Mix, that gets difficult as people literally mix sweets up. So what happens if people don't want them. You can't just put them back.

Are they being ripped off? Well - it's the market price for pick and mix.

It’s the market price at that venue.

Supply and demand.

People want Pick and Mix
They supply Pick and Mix

Do you think the price of Pick and Mix should be regulated?

Exactly.

Parents buy shit ton of sweets and then complain it costs a shit ton of money. 🤷🏻‍♀️

Still not the fault of the store holder that the caution off button is switched off.

She could have said no to her kids.

She could have taken less - 1.6kg is quite obvious!

I've paid about £10 before at places like this and also estimated about a tenner and it's been £15.

But I know what I'm letting myself into before I put it in the bag and we do it once a year at the Christmas market.

fancyacuppatea · Today 11:22
Especially if you're allowing your child to eat the sweets before you've paid for them...there's a thing called "manners", see also "greed

They did not allow the children to eat the sweets before they paid for them.
As my husband was paying, my little girl started eating the sweets

So they had all been weighed and the Dad was paying the full price owed.

As for greed, look at the lengths the company went to make people long for the sweets! These were young children doing exactly what the company hoped. They were behaving as expected.
The company manipulated the children.

We both made sure the kids never went overboard
Can you imagine how many sweets they get when they « go overboard ». And then people blame the obesity crisis on fast food / price of healthy food / cost of running appliances 🙄

The bags were nowhere near half full, but nobody knows what 100g of sweets looks like
Most people know what carrying a 1kg item feels like though - equivalent to 1 liter of liquid…

So annoying that the company is now offering a refund. Lesson learned, act entitled and stupid to get what you want. I wonder now how many people will try to get freebies from them now.

The company manipulated the children
As a parent you are in charge though, and should be capable of saying no when needed.
I literally just now told my DD we are not buying a snack from the train as the price is 3 times what it is worth and therefore we’ll wait to reach our destination. She is not traumatized.

real life application of density in a physics lesson!

Are we talking about the mass of the goods here or people's inability to understand simple pricing?!

The company manipulated the children.

I'd have more sympathy with that perspective if the kids were there on their own and the shopkeeper gladly sold them much more than they thought was wise; but they had their parents there: it's the job of parents to be the gatekeeper between what children want and what they can realistically have. It's no different from all the toy adverts on TV in the run-up to Christmas - of course the companies are trying to manipulate the desire, but that's exactly why kids have parents/guardians.

Newsflash: companies manipulate children to make money

It's what's been happening for ages.

x-posted with LovelyLovelyWarmCoffee there

Are we talking about the mass of the goods here or people's inability to understand simple pricing?!

I'm talking about the fact that when teaching a topic like density to children it can be helpful to encourage them to think about its use in real life situations, which can help in their understanding of it and application of their knowledge.

Most people know what carrying a 1kg item feels like though - equivalent to 1 liter of liquid

I think it is very likely that very many people would not know this.

Millions of adults in the UK could be missing out on the benefits of improved numeracy skills due to a failure to appreciate their importance in everyday life, according to a survey released today for National Numeracy Day from research carried out by Ipsos Mori, in partnership with National Numeracy and the Policy Institute at King’s College London.
www.kcl.ac.uk/news/research-reveals-how-poor-maths-skills-are-holding-the-uk-back

^More than half the working-age population has the numeracy level expected of a primary school child
Based on the results from a five-question multiple-choice test of people’s everyday maths skills, 56% of the population scored less than 3. The questions are everyday maths questions from the National Numeracy Challenge and are all roughly equivalent to those within a GCSE maths paper. The most recent Government-commissioned survey of
adult skills1 saw 49% of those surveyed achieve Entry Level 3 or lower, which is roughly equivalent to the level expected of a primary school child.^
www.nationalnumeracy.org.uk/sites/default/files/documents/Our_year_in_numbers/national_numeracy_day_2019.pdf